


aggressive negotiations (the blood you bleed is just the blood you owe)

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Brainwashing, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Abuse, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Resurrection, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Unreliable Narrator, movie compliant, the force is sadistic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22868404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: With rising panic Rey protests, “The Force is finished with Ben Solo.”“I’m sure it is,” Hux bites back. “Only I’m not.”He will burn worlds to bring Ren back.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Temporary Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 41
Kudos: 161
Collections: The_Multishipper_Post_TROS_Happy_Place_Collection





	aggressive negotiations (the blood you bleed is just the blood you owe)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the marvelous tiresroll, a Chinese translation is available [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23475739).
> 
> This story blends Disney canon and Legends content on [disruptions of the Force.](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Disturbance_in_the_Force)
> 
> “Rey had learned that the Force was not her instrument- that, in fact, it was the other way around. Just as Kylo was its instrument, despite his determination to bend it to his will. He would learn that one day, she sensed- the Force wasn’t finished with him. And that meant Kylo’s life was not hers to take, whatever future she thought she saw ahead of him.” - Jason Fry, _The Last Jedi_ 's novelization

_Is it a girl or boy,_ another parent might ask.

_Is it healthy?_

“What’s the count?” demands Brendol Hux when a droid offers him a wailing babe to hold– red-cheeked, red-haired and wanting.

A needle pricks skin, and the droid draws a vial from the wound.

“Early estimates are off the charts. He has less than 10 midichlorians.”

When the droid offers him the child again, Brendol turns on his heel and strides away.

.

Hux doesn’t remember learning about the Jedi. They simply _are_ , like gravity: an unquestionable force of the universe.

His father alludes to the Jedi constantly. He waxes eloquent on a grand Order of peacekeepers that scoured the galaxy for the finest recruits, keeping children almost from birth and molding them from the inside out.

“We can’t replicate the Jedi Order precisely,” Brendol muses in the first days of the First Order. “But we’ll come close enough.”

Though young Hux hears this, Brendol intends the words for another officer. All the officers converse over the boy’s head as if he is invisible, only empty air.

“How does one become a Jedi?” Hux dares one night, blessedly naive.

“Through extensive study and training.”

“If we found an old master...if we rebuilt the old Jedi temples and recovered the curriculum… could I learn to be a Jedi?”

“You couldn’t possibly,” Brendol replies, not looking up from his datapad. “That’s reserved for special children.”

.

Hux distinguishes himself in every field he can find. He mainlines caf and runs longer, trains harder, dedicates himself to his studies with a ruthless focus. He thinks up grand legacies, an entire Empire and himself on the throne, and he plots out each step he needs to achieve that destiny. 

He designs a new generation of ships. He assists in the mapping of the Unknown Regions. He consumes old Imperial propaganda and sharpens it for a new age, editing it frame by frame. He propels himself into the abyss with every drop of fuel he’s got, his intelligence sparkling brilliant. 

His love is worthless. To his father, he remains invisible.

Hux nearly buckles under the weight of his own irrelevance.

.

For years Hux remains invisible to Brendol, until at last he locks his tyrant of a father in a bacta tank to disintegrate, molecule by molecule.

.

The Empire rises, now freed from the shortsighted mysticism of a dead Emperor. It rises as the First Order, as a machine with no need for magic. It ascends on the strength of clear, ruthless logic, and Hux floats forth starry-eyed and sees a whole galaxy waiting to be led, laid at his feet.

His optimism lasts for about one month.

A Force-user named Snoke crashes in, choosing a rustling robe of gold for his uniform, a roving ship for his home. He ignores the hierarchy, the Order’s clearly defined rules for ranks and promotions, and he chooses a throne. No one dares disagree.

Seemingly, no one else thinks to disagree.

Hux stands at the edge of a meeting and flirts with disobedience, with questioning why an outsider can glide onto a throne that was never meant to exist. 

.

Ren follows: a hulking phantom, all guttering snarls and loose strings, seemingly random in his violence. Yet he shows skill at ruthless scheming, a sniper’s inescapable precision when snatching chances to dance on Hux’s nerves. Ren gleefully crumples First Order property– rips droids apart circuit by circuit with the Force, reduces console panels to smoking rubble. The Order wages war on the New Republic. Ren wages war on the Order’s most sophisticated tech, seemingly possessed.

“That was a million-credit tracking system you just demolished. Its power was unparalleled in the history of innovation–”

“Your kriffing tracking system is nothing compared to the Force–”

They battle endlessly, Hux’s hand fastened about Ren’s throat, his fists tearing at Ren’s hair, protests gasped against every inch of Ren’s naked skin. Under his hands Ren is warm and alive, and Hux wonders if this is how it feels to matter.

.

Ren sleeps– snores, a bit of artless humanity that ought to irritate Hux yet doesn’t. Hux lies beside him, their faces lit only by a galaxy’s worth of stars outside their window. He can barely distinguish sleep from waking. His plotting cannot stop for dreams.

Outside lies a world of silver stars, awaiting a conqueror. 

Hux has never stepped foot in a reconditioning chamber. He has never needed to, not when all the First Order’s principles were sewn from birth into his synapses. The Order offers a single harmony to rule the galaxy, a lasting peace, an end to contradiction. There is no questioning the ideal. Hux drifts, spellbound by the honor of serving so magnificent a cause.

(A contradiction: he is nothing, a mere meaningless servant. He is a general with billions of necks under his boot.)

Privileged with a high vantage point, Hux sees the whole design– life, death, peace and violence arranged for the sake of a single system. A chosen agent, Hux serves this precarious balance. Though enamoured of the Order’s beauty, he knows others might misunderstand it as ominous, even terrifying. It takes careful calibration to convince allies of its benevolence, and so Hux oversees the propaganda, programming the galaxy to appreciate the end of disorder. He leads the reconditioning, infiltrating the minds of new recruits and sculpting until they cannot imagine a galaxy without the Order’s guidance.

Hux does it for their own good. He is interested in their advancement. The best _will_ advance, rising by their innate skill and purity of faith to the top of the Order’s hierarchy, for the Order is nothing if not meritocratic–

“Is that why you’re in charge of it?” Ren muttered the first time Hux expressed this sentiment. “The son of an Imperial general?”

Ren has no appreciation for the Order’s rationality, clinging instead to his faith in that preposterous Force. According to his old-fashioned superstitions, the Force dictates his life and every fate in the galaxy. Hux diagnoses him with a tendency towards over-interpretation, towards assigning meaning where there is none. It’s a search for organization in a chaotic life. It reeks of desperation.

“Why must we devote an entire Destroyer to the search for Skywalker?” Hux once asked.

“He means to kill me,” spat Ren. “I won’t give him the chance. The Force isn’t through with me yet.”

Hux approved the requisition with an eyeroll. “You suffer from delusions of grandeur.”

“The Force has chosen me,” Ren whispered that night. “It created my bloodline from nothing, and it’ll grant me this whole galaxy as my empire...and yours.”

All delusions of grandeur, but this one still makes Hux smile.

.

Hux detests Ren’s saber. It’s an electrical hazard, flinging off sparks, clearly dependent on an unstable kyber crystal battery. He says as much aloud.

“You don’t know the Force,” Ren snaps back, “but kyber crystals are bound to it. _You’ll_ never grasp their secrets.”

“You doubt the power of scientific investigation?”

“You _shouldn’t_ understand them. They were left out of the Jedi archives for a reason.”

Hux scoffs. 

He devotes years to kyber. He is hardly the first. Galen Erso came before him, architect of the Death Star, and Hux pores through the turncoat’s old records. For all his scientific insight, Erso tended strangely towards anthropomorphizing his subjects. His records insist that the crystals changed their structure over time to confound him, that they were torturing him with warnings and portentous visions. His records depict a slow glide into magical madness.

Hux notices no madness of his own.

Perhaps he’s immune to such frailties of the mind. Perhaps he’s already as mad as can be. Whatever the reason, kyber stays stable under his scrutiny, easily accessed and explained by his research. With remarkable speed he subjugates the crystals to the Order’s will.

The Death Star’s lasers ran on kyber batteries. The Order’s ambitions vault higher.

Starkiller. Starkiller Base will be the First Order’s masterpiece, a superweapon capable of striking from an arbitrary distance, a beacon of scientific understanding. Kyber acquiesces kindly. It complies entirely with the Order’s demands, as if perhaps it recognizes the grandeur of the Order’s aims. When Hux whispers this wish late one night, Ren snorts and hones right in on the alternate explanation.

“Maybe the kyber hasn’t even noticed you’re there.”

.

Starkiller. It is a tool Hux creates for the Order, to be treasured and used judiciously, to maximize impact while minimizing the loss of life–

“We shall target the Hosnia system,” rumbles Snoke.

“All of it?” Hux only blinks at first. “Surely the optimal course would be to strike only at Hosnia Prime. We could include Hosnia 3 for its datacenters, if we really wished to show off our capacity for sending multiple rays at once–”

“The optimal course—” Snoke rises from the throne and slithers over to him, voice laced with laughter— “is to eliminate the entire system. Do you resist?”

Hux could. Snoke crooks a ringed finger– a sure sign of a Force mind trick– but the thought persists until Hux extinguishes it himself.

He lets his face go blank. “It will be as the Supreme Leader wishes it.”

.

It’s the Force. This is a matter of the Force. The Force must have bestowed on Snoke some prodigious insight, some counsel only he was judged worthy to hear, and Snoke surely kept its secrets for tactical reasons, for the Order’s own sake. For the Order’s sake he refused to explain his choice of target, eliminating five planets where only two would do. For the Order’s sake he shut Hux out, though Hux has lived his whole life pure in his faith, has cut himself open on the Order’s altar–

There is an easy solution to his discomfort. There is little shame in the method; he encourages his officers to apply it liberally both to their troops and to themselves as needed. He lowers the drug doses, ordering up a mere third of the normal quantities. He eliminates the modules on the nobility of Order’s mission and chooses only what he needs: a lesson on hierarchy, on respecting the decisions of one’s superiors.

He steps into the reconditioning chamber.

He emerges in a state of floating bliss.

He cannot imagine why the Order’s few malcontents dislike reconditioning. How can they dislike this, the chamber’s meditative contentment, the peace and purpose and effortless sense of ascension?

He emerges, restored to balance, and redoubles his efforts to eliminate the entire Hosnia system.

.

He asks Snoke to fund a second set of shields for Starkiller Base, to prevent any trespassers from sneaking through during the refresh periods.

“No one shall pierce the defenses.” Snoke dismisses his paranoia. “I have foreseen it.”

.

Hosnia burns.

With it, Starkiller.

Hux steals Ren just in time, salvages what remains of him from a planet on the verge of implosion. Snoke reaches through a hologram and smashes Hux into a wall with a flick of a finger and summons him to the _Supremacy_ while his head still rings _._ Hux stands on the _Supremacy,_ stands before the throne to endure his punishment. Snoke drops a galaxy’s worth of blame on his shoulders and with the Force damns him for failing. With the Force, Snoke electrocutes him. With the Force, Snoke sears the guilt into his every nerve. Hux failed the galaxy and he failed Ren and he failed Starkiller and when he goes to protest that the Force failed him first, that Han Solo would have never made it past the shields if Snoke had listened to Hux over his damned Force, Snoke converts his objection to screaming.

.

Taped together by bacta patches, Hux sits in on High Command’s next meeting. Ren drones on and on about the Force. Hux concentrates on staying upright in his chair and looks forward to nighttime, but Ren never comes. 

At dawn Hux settles for the reconditioning chamber.

.

The Order needs his loyalty. Even if that’s a delusion of grandeur, if a structure as magnificent as the First Order depends on no individual, the Order _demands_ his loyalty. This single thought rings in Hux’s head when he emerges from the chamber. This thought sustains him through the debacle on D’Qar, through Snoke’s abuse– still vividly rendered by the Force, the Supreme Leader’s phantom fingers reaching through hologram to clench all too real around Hux’s throat. It sustains him when the _Supremacy_ cracks apart around him, when he runs to Snoke’s side and finds him bisected and checks the camera footage and finds Ren a _traitor,_ when Hux’s own mindless hand slips to his blaster–

The reconditioning cracks.

Hux looks no different, he’s sure– still calm and confident with the Order’s patch blazoned on his sleeve. His heart has cracked apart like the ship where he stands. Ren is a traitor, and the Order is quite clear on the fate of traitors.

Hux rebels.

He does not shoot. Ren wakes, stumbling and bleary-eyed, and Hux does not call for his troops. He stands alone and implores Ren to see sense, to return to the proper order of things. The army is Hux’s. Ren has the Force to command. They have no ruler, they _need_ no ruler, why have a single throne when they could rule _together – _

Ren’s fist closes a few feet away, and Hux falls. The Force chokes out a pledge Hux doesn’t mean.

“Long live the Supreme Leader.”

.

Hux is loyal to the Order. He declares loudly that he’ll stay for the Order’s sake. He tells himself this a thousand times over.

He stays for Ren, his heart sustained by a paper-thin hope.

Hux approaches late one night. He dithers at the door to Ren’s private quarters and wonders whether he’s supposed to kneel now, to prostrate himself at Ren’s altar and beg forgiveness for crimes he hasn’t committed like a suppliant of a rogue, uncaring god. In a past lifetime he’d override the security code, let himself in without permission, and come to rest by Ren, fingers carding through soft black hair.

While he vacillates the door clunks open.

“What are your orders, Supreme Leader?”

Ren doesn’t acknowledge his entrance. He doesn’t seem to notice Hux, instead gazing out at a galaxy’s worth of stars.

When he speaks, his voice is low. “Find her.”

To anyone else, it would seem a tactical order– a thoroughly reasoned attempt to curb a lethal threat.

“What do you want with this girl?” asks Hux, unable to leave well enough alone.

“I want–”

To anyone else, it would be obvious. Ren wishes to control her or to kill her.

To anyone else.

“Why her?” demands Hux. “Why not remove her with Snoke, or– hell, kill her on Starkiller? ”

Ren’s body tautens, and Hux’s hands clench, preparing to clutch at his own throat. Yet an instant later Ren loosens, and he whirls about from the window and inhales deep. When he speaks he enunciates too clearly, like he’s addressing a toddler.

“Rey and I- it’s like we were made from the same star.”

Hux allows himself a scowl. “Is this another Force myth, like with your precious kyber?”

“It’s no _myth,”_ he growls.

“But it is the Force?”

Ren pauses.

“Yes.”

“And what does the Force will?” Hux says, making no effort to hide his sarcasm.

“That we join together.” Ren’s fingers twitch.

“And you’ll have her as your empress?”

When Ren doesn’t answer, Hux balls up his fists. He resists the urge to turn his ship’s considerable forces _against_ Ren, to hold him at gunpoint until he tastes regret.

“So what?” Hux barks, feeling like the rabid cur Snoke had deemed him. “I’m to fade quietly, without leaving a single mark?”

“You’ve left your mark,” Ren says in a tone he’s clearly mistaken for calming. “The galaxy will never forget Hosnia; it’s like Alderaan, a magnificent, bleeding wound in the Force–”

“Forget the galaxy,” Hux roars.

“What mark did you think you’d leave?” Ren spits back, his veneer of serenity shattering.

Hux’s eyes flicker for one moment to Ren’s scar– the girl’s mark, branded onto his face. Then Hux strides back out of the room in glorious fury.

In surrender.

.

Hux rationalizes.

The Empire rose to power with two Force-sensitives at its head. Now that Snoke is gone, the girl is the obvious choice of replacement. Pursuing her is therefore uncharacteristically shrewd military strategy, on Ren’s part. And if she will not turn for want of an empire, then it is only strategic for Ren to offer _himself_ as well. The Order _demands_ that Ren surrender himself to her. Rationally speaking, there is no need for Ren to consider Hux’s feelings, to maintain anything more than a minimal working relationship.

Rationalization fails.

Hux turns to reconditioning. He steps into the sterile white chamber and lets the anesthetic hypnotize him and listens to the propaganda he himself fine-tuned in a more comfortable age. Overlapping voices drone on around him, lulling him back towards his old complacency, yet a current of unrest thrums underneath it all and punctures his calm with an inconvenient suspicion.

The Force gave Ren to the girl.

.

Ren is Supreme Leader. He places himself on his throne, rendered untouchable. To Hux, he is unrecognizable.

He is hers now.

Ren is mad. He scours the galaxy for the girl and for Sith relics, though before he had no interest in the Emperor’s old religion. Hux breaks into Ren’s quarters to inspect his collection of ancient trash. With the help of a translator droid he works out the rudiments of the Sith language, and so he learns the words that appear time and time again across the texts.

_Force bond._

_Dyad._

_Soulmates._

In the grand scheme, Hux’s love is worthless. The Force gave Ren to the girl. 

Hux sets himself on a weekly reconditioning schedule. 

.

_Why is the First Order justified? Because it is the First Order._

Hux writes lies for himself alone. He constructs bulletproof treatises on loyalty, on respecting hierarchy, on accepting one’s own worthlessness, on the unquestionable necessity of ignoring one’s own will for the sake of the system. He drugs himself with lies, places himself before a full firing squad of audio clips played on cacophonous, hypnotizing repeat.

Pryde takes over the First Order’s military. Ren chases a ghost.

The words fail. Logic fails Hux, and he turns to the real drugs, diverting tankfuls from the reconditioning program for his own personal use. He forcefully shuts up every doubt. Shuts down every stab of anxiety. Overrides every gasping, screeching nightmare.

Ren chases a ghost of a girl and every day ignores Hux, who stands live, solid and wanting an arm’s length away.

Hux is the Order. He has nothing else. He built it, he and his father, through logic and clear-eyed tactics and sweat, and the sight of the Order’s fleet and troopers still makes him flush with pride, and even as he crushes every other thought he clings to that dreamlike, childlike devotion–

“General! General?”

Hux wakes momentarily in medical, half-convinced he’s already dead. Droids whir around him and beep in high-pitched head-splitting Binary– _heart failure, antidote, overdose – _ and he drifts back down. When his eyes float open once more Pryde stands at the foot of his bed, his face a stone mask.

“Through the blessing of the Force, the Emperor has survived,” Pryde reports. “The First Order is now his Final Order.”

Hux is wide awake.

.

The Emperor had his turn. He failed. He dropped down a reactor shaft and he got pulverized and toasted to a crisp by the Second Death Star’s explosion.

The Emperor is alive and blasting mysterious broadcasts to anyone who will listen, laying claim once more to the galaxy.

The Force has broken the most absolute law of nature and raised a man from the dead that he might win an empire.

( _Hux’s_ empire.)

Hux balances on a knife-edge, the tension of withdrawal coiled like chains around every limb no matter how he stretches. He does not sleep. He barely breathes, afflicted by a restlessness he has never known. 

He designs a mysterious broadcast of his own, aimed solely at the Resistance.

.

Fast as he can, Hux tapers the drugs. The Order evolves faster, transforming overnight into an unfamiliar monster. Red armor replaces white. The First Order’s tech is abandoned for outdated Imperial ships. Carefully, ruthlessly, the old Empire creeps in like an invasive species strangling an ecosystem. Its display on Kimiji shows off the Final Order’s new mobile, planet-killing superlasers– shameless bastardizations of Starkiller’s design.

Truly, Hux has nothing left of his own.

The Final Order is his enemy now. He sabotages it in every way he can, collecting its secrets and spitting them back out to the Resistance. A galaxy still spins outside the window, and even if Hux cannot claim it he will not let it go, unmarked by his existence. If there is no place for him in the First Order, he will remake himself to the Resistance’s specifications.

Aware of Pryde’s growing suspicion, Hux steals the First Order’s newest stealth armor, donning thin, carefully arranged plates to protect nearly all his vital organs and blood vessels. He reveals himself to Finn and Poe Dameron and asks to be shot in the arm, that it might seem like he struggled against the Resistance forces. He will need the cover when he returns to Pryde. The plates protect his arteries, but the non-essential muscle of his arm will bleed–

Out of spite, Finn shoots Hux’s thoroughly shielded leg instead, leaving no damage to speak of. A thought flares hot and paranoid in Hux’s head: there’s no trusting anyone but himself.

He runs to the medbay and lets himself into the reconditioning labs. For once he ignores the drugs and goes for the blood samples– specimens for new research to prevent more 2187s from breaking their programming. He grabs a vial at random and pours it onto his trousers and an extra bandage, wrapped cautiously around his leg to complete the disguise.

Pryde hears out his entire story of woe, how he was overpowered by the cruel Resistance and coerced into providing them aid. Then he promptly shoots Hux in the heart.

His armor holds.

The Resistance attacks. Hux escapes Pryde’s ship in the battle’s chaos. He steals a TIE fighter and leaps to lightspeed. When choosing his precise destination, he wavers. There are twenty possible options in the Outer Rim alone, and he flits between them, unmoored.

In the background he switches between hacked comm feeds from both the Order and the Resistance, monitoring the battle at Exegol. The Resistance wins even more quickly than he expected, and Hux wonders at their mysterious luck as the feeds flow on–

“The Supreme Leader has been reported dead within the Resistance.” The report comes from one of the Order’s intelligence channels. “An initial sweep of Exegol revealed no sign of a corpse however–”

Hux sets his course for the Resistance base.

.

It’s as useful as he had predicted, having two high-ranking Resistance heroes on his side. Once both generals personally vouch for his do-gooding credentials, he is allowed to approach. Finn confronts him as he emerges from the ship into Ajan Kloss’s rainforest. In the distance float cheers and music.

“Where is he?” When Finn just frowns, Hux lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Ren. Where are you hiding him?”

“Ren– he died on Exegol.”

“Yes,” he snaps, “I’ve heard your cover story. Where is he?”

Finn shifts, nervous, and Hux wonders whether the rumors about himself and Ren ever filtered down to sanitation. “There wasn’t a body.”

Hux snorts. “Of course you don’t have a corpse to show off. Has he gone honeymooning with his dearly beloved?”

“His– who?”

With a roll of his eyes, Hux starts to push past him. “Just put me on a call with him. I’ll have this all straightened out in a minute–”

“But he’s _dead.”_

Something in his tone stops Hux cold. Slowly, he turns his head to look back at Finn over his shoulder.

“Why are you lying to me?” he murmurs.

“I’m not.”

“Everyone is,” Hux whispers, almost to himself. “All the damn time.”

Finn swallows hard and inspects him for several seconds. Finally he shakes his head.

“You need to talk to Rey.”

.

The scavenger meditates cross-legged, still as marble at the center of a clearing. Her eyes are closed. With the same wariness his Supreme Leaders had inspired, Hux approaches her. While the soil does not mar the pure white of her clothes, Hux suspects he will not likewise escape the dirt, and so he chooses to simply stand before her, arms clasped behind his back in perfect parade rest.

“You’ve come about Ben,” she says without opening her eyes. Perhaps Hux imagines the thrum under her exquisite Imperial accent, as if many voices speak through her.

“You’ve got them convinced he’s dead.” Hux keeps his voice controlled, perfectly neutral.

“He passed on Exegol.”

“The Emperor killed him?”

Hux’s every nerve is alight. 

“The Emperor killed me,” she says with an unshakable, blissful calm. “Ben pulled me back to life through the Force. He moved on in the process.”

Hux eliminates ten tangential questions to focus on the main one. “So you were resurrected through the Force, as was Palpatine. Why not…”

“There was nothing left of him to resurrect.”

Hux purses his lips. “I don’t know what that means.”

Rey opens her eyes and pushes back her spotless hood to look at him. When she speaks, it’s in that same infuriatingly patient tone a nurse might take with a witless child. “His body disappeared, when he passed into the Force.”

“Disintegration, then. He was hit with, what, a Mandalorian-style disruptor–”

“No,” she interrupts. “He wasn’t hurt in any way.”

Hux hesitates. “So he died of plain exhaustion?”

“Not at all. Ben was the strongest, the most whole he had ever been when it happened.”

Suppressing the urge to haul her off the ground and shake her, he asks, “Then...why did he die?”

She lifts her chin. “Because it was his time to die.”

_Why is the First Order justified? Because it is the First Order._

“Forgive me,” he says, “for my ignorance in these matters. Did _you_ decide it was his time?”

“No, the Force did. We are all instruments of the Force.”

“Ren had mentioned this.”

“He fought the Force for so long,” she muses. “He ignored its will, but he learned his place at the end.”

“He fought the Force,” Hux echoes, though the words blur, oddly shapeless. His gaze drifts beyond Rey and the forest, to the stars above.

“Once he had learned that, the Force was finished with him.”

“And you…are satisfied with this state of affairs?”

Sadness glimmers for a moment and flickers out, returning her to easy serenity.

“This is the will of the Force,” she pronounces. “Do you understand?”

“Thank you.” A sincere smile breaches Hux’s mask, and he offers her a slow, elegant bow, like he’s been lulled into her same contentment. “I understand perfectly.”

.

Hux possesses an intimate understanding of tyranny.

.

For all its tactical sophistication, the First Order’s method of dealing with a hostile enemy boiled down to simple steps. Step 1: use diplomatic channels to politely submit your requests.

“I would like to see Rey again,” Hux says.

Another Resistance soldier informs him that Rey has gone, departed for Tatooine. After a moment, Hux recognizes this soldier– Rose Tico, from the _Supremacy_ debacle.

“So,” she says with a smile, “you’re a rebel hero now.”

“Disappointed?”

“Sorry if I doubt your convictions,” she retorts. “See, I don’t get out all that much, but I like reading about systems all around the galaxy. Like the Hosnian system.”

He waits, frozen by this Resistance agent who doesn’t reach even to his shoulders.

“You like academies, right? Training programs?”

He watches her warily.

“So you probably knew about the Hosnian flight academy. Thousands of kids, dreaming of flying through space...all dead now.”

“Thousands of future military assets,” he mutters.

Her eyes flash. “And there were the hanging gardens. Trees and flowers grown as art, suspended in the air just to spread beauty.”

“I’ve never understood the appeal of plants.”

“And there was an entire sector," she says, smiling through gritted teeth, "dedicated to perfect food. They made caf, grown and roasted for optimal caffeine content so one cup would keep you up all night. You can see the appeal of that, can’t you?”

With a tilt of the head he concedes it.

“Do you...” She scrunches up her brow, a look of frustration that twists his heart, it reminds him so of Ren. “Do you care about anyone? At all?”

He breaks her gaze and sighs. “How might I go about contacting Rey?”

.

He writes a neat entreaty, beseeching the last Jedi for her aid in a matter of magic. He has read through Ren’s old Sith texts, he has seen two corpses reanimated in his lifetime, and so he knows, he _knows_ there are magical means to undo death. The texts spoke of portals to a world between worlds, doorways scattered across Malachor and Exegol and other perfectly real planets that were “strong in the Force.” According to the texts, they could open to the other side if approached by a person who was strong in the Force. Someone worthy of their magical power.

Hux doesn’t waste time pretending he has a chance.

His message is received.

Ignored.

Hux hacks a lock. Disables a tracker. Charts a course from Ajan Kloss to Exegol.

.

The desert sand coats Hux’s mouth within minutes, an eerie reminder of his old days on Jakku. At first glance the two worlds look nothing alike, given the darkness that suffocates every inch of Exegol. Then the lightning strikes, revealing the silhouette of ten crashed Star Destroyers against the horizon.

With a snap of his fingers Hux summons a squad of astromech droids, neurowashed and stolen off the Resistance. With a flurry of beeps they roll out from his ship to surround him. Hux dons goggles to see in the night, and a black mask for the dust, and sets out to scavenge.

.

In the ruins of the Emperor’s fortress, Hux finds more Sith texts. They are mostly ancient, but a recent one claims Rey as a Palpatine. Hux takes them all.

Next he analyzes the Destroyers, finds the least damaged, and claims it as his own. He resets the passcodes and sets just enough booby-traps to deter other scavengers. Somehow the Jawas have already descended on this new starship graveyard. Hux breaks into their sandcrawlers and steals the parts he needs, obtaining them at gunpoint when necessary.

He pieces his Destroyer back together– a Xyston-class ship from the Final Order, though First Order ships are scattered all around him. He runs diagnostics and makes his repairs and orders his droids about with brisk, curt commands, like he still has an army to lead. Like he’s General Hux of the First Order, sights now and forever set on owning this galaxy. Like he can rebuild a new Empire, in the footsteps of his father before him.

He marches about and plays the general for an empty ship. 

For the audience that’s always invisibly, carelessly watching.

He perfects his Destroyer, arms it with stolen shuttles and a Final Order superlaser and all the First Order’s cloaking systems. From the ruins of the _Steadfast_ he ransacks the reconditioning lab, grabbing tanks seemingly at random. He steals every medical monitor in the room, the sensitive equipment he would need to keep himself medicated on this side of an overdose. Armed with this treasure, he launches his ship towards the Unknown Regions.

He lands in the old Imperial shipyards where Brendol Hux had fled in the final days of the Empire. From these foundries the First Order had risen. Hux plunders these too, outfitting his Destroyer with the simulators from the stormtrooper training program, with a massive fleet of probe droids for exploring new planets, with maps and data and coaxium fuel. He modifies a component from his Starkiller design and attaches it to his new ship’s superlaser.

He follows the fate set out for him. He is doomed to wander the Unknown Regions at the fringe of the galaxy, to roam madly in the hopes of taking down yet another New Republic. He must totter about on his lonely ship until the Resistance finally puts him out of his misery. 

He performs a careful inventory. Relaunches his ship. Begins plotting a course to Ajan Kloss.

At the last possible moment, he scrambles the coordinates and abandons this galaxy entirely.

.

As a child, Hux often wondered why explorers never simply moved to a new galaxy, leaving behind the old world’s provincial conflict. At around the same time he had asked his father why he couldn’t become a Jedi.

It occurs to him now that those questions had the same answer.

This thought drifts through his head, a pinprick in an otherwise painless world. He lies in his empty medbay as the blue of hyperspace flows by, as the fever reducer flows through his veins. He is sober. He is not addicted to this drug, nor to the immunotherapy meds currently tearing apart his cells.

He corrects himself: not _his_ cells.

The fever reducer smoothes the immunotherapy meds. The meds came from the _Steadfast’s_ lab, where they were developed to keep troopers from resisting reconditioning. Troopers only escaped the Order’s reconditioning by the will of the Force, so the meds shut up the Force’s voice by shooting its messengers. They weaponize the subject’s immune system against midichlorians.

Unleashed on a new galaxy’s systems, his probe droids have confirmed his hypotheses: midichlorians don’t exist beyond the edge of his old galaxy, and local cultures have no record of any magical force.

Hux’s immune system is currently obliterating every one of the– few, feeble– midichlorians still persisting in his body. Aloud, Hux commands a droid to destroy the reconditioning drugs, all untouched.

.

Though he has only a teetering structure of hypotheses based mainly on instinct, Hux understands tyranny.

He had no chance as a child. He had been indoctrinated, pressed into awe before he could think. There was a hierarchy and no room to challenge it. From birth he had been routed onto a path and condemned to irrelevance. He simply wasn’t good enough to be a Jedi.

There was a hierarchy, and he understood perfectly why Force-Sensitives– the Jedi and the Sith and every other seemingly distinct faction– all defended it. The Force offered a single harmony to rule the galaxy, a lasting peace, an end to contradiction. And it whispered this ideal into midichlorians, directly into _brains_ from the womb, until there was no space for doubt.

Reconditioning is a marvelous thing.

To its chosen servants, the Force gives a privileged vantage point- a sliver of the design they mistake for the whole, life and death and peace and violence all twisted together. Midichlorians whisper. They call the design elegant, _benevolent._ It is an elaborate illusion, one the Order’s propagandists aspired to and never approached. All across the galaxy Jedi proselytized about the Force’s inherent goodness and damned their scapegoats– the Sith, that elusive “dark side"– and the entire galaxy had swallowed their cacophony of claims. Even _Hux_ had been half-convinced, had thought it was just the dark side of the Force that caused pain and death. He had thought the Force was woven into the entire universe. He had believed that there could be nothing without its mystical guidance.

One galaxy over, death and pain and life continue on without a single midichlorian in sight.

Rey, granddaughter of Palpatine, had mattered to that galaxy. So had Ren, a plaything from a bloodline the Force had made from thin air. By contrast Hux was born irrelevant, disconnected from the Force’s messaging by his relative lack of midichlorians. He never heard the voices of the Force. At a guess, the Force couldn’t hear his thoughts either. It had barely seen him. Certainly its kyber had never deigned to acknowledge him. He had been irrelevant, and so he escaped the net. He was likely alone in that feat, the only person in galactic history to even think of defecting from the galaxy. From the Force’s empire.

Hux must admit to admiration.

The Force is the grandest tyrant he has ever encountered. Not omniscient, not omnipotent, but powerful and skillful enough to style itself that way. It saw Hux as harmless and utterly meaningless, just one more Imperial pawn preparing one more doomed assault on democracy, and so it let him go. It has Kylo Ren– once a beloved instrument, now discarded like outdated tech for a new model– in its vault of souls. He is the Force’s now. He will not be released so easily.

Step 2 of the Order’s strategy for dealing with hostile enemies, regardless of how much you admire them: bomb them into submission.

.

Working alongside his army of droids, Hux blends the Final Order’s superlaser with Starkiller’s remote sniping capabilities. He checks his kyber crystals. They never change.

Ren had called Hosnia a magnificent wound in the Force, Hux’s one lasting mark on the galaxy. Perhaps it had been a metaphor, just one of Ren’s flights of fancy, but that phrasing gives Hux hope. He takes his place at an empty bridge, standing tall with no one to see, and wonders if this is how being strong in the dark side felt. His heart thrums with rage.

With a raging, worthy love.

He flicks a switch and fires two shots from another galaxy. Malachor disintegrates. So does Exegol. 

He jumps to lightspeed, switching locations before anyone can reverse the attack vectors and hunt him down. Then he sends out a broadcast.

.

This time, Rey deigns to respond.

Hux recalls Snoke’s torture, perpetrated even over hologram, and for a second he considers having a droid speak for him. But if he hasn’t escaped the Force’s reach, if its physical power extends beyond the one galaxy, he supposes he should find out _now_ rather than later _._

“What do you want?” she demands.

He waits for a phantom fist to close his windpipe, or for a sudden slumber to wipe his demands from his mind. He stays upright and breathing. He is incandescently awake.

His wants are devastating in their simplicity. First, he demands back the lives he took on Hosnia, restored to health elsewhere in their galaxy.

“Who do you think you are,” she rages, the sound ringing with a thousand voices, “to make demands of the Force?”

“I think I’m no one. Perfectly irrelevant in the grand scheme. On the other hand I happen to have a large gun.”

“You cannot threaten the Force,” replies Rey, words weighed with unshakable certainty.

Hux flicks a switch. Rips open the scarred Force wound of Alderaan.

Jumps to a new spot in space.

“You were saying?”

In the ensuing silence, he wonders if he overplayed his hand.

“...What are your other demands?”

“Just the one.”

“Never.”

“So the Force values one life over the billions of Hosnia? How very egalitarian.”

“There is no undoing that turn!”

He turns the pages of a Sith textbook, close enough that the mic will pick up its rustling. 

“So far I’ve restrained myself to uninhabited targets,” he muses in mocking contemplation. “But I have this handy list right here of places ‘strong in the Force.’ Possible targets include Dagobah, Lothal, Ahch-To, Mortis once I can work out the hyperspatial chicanery...” 

“You will not–”

“Won’t I?” He slams the book shut. “What will stop me? My decency? My deep and abiding respect for life?”

With rising panic Rey protests: “The Force is finished with Ben Solo.”

“I’m sure it is,” Hux bites back. “Only I’m not.”

Silence.

When she speaks again, her voice shakes, subdued and all her own. “What do you want with him?”

He gives her his silence.

.

The good people of Hosnia are all resurrected on other Core Worlds, or so Rey says. Hux can hardly check. He doesn’t care to.

He paces as if he’s traded his blood for caf, and he waits for an unarmed ship to cross the edge of his old galaxy and arrive at his specified rendezvous coordinates. Hux will not meet this ship himself. He sends a shuttle manned by his droids to board it and monitors the progress from a parsec away.

Inside the ship: one life-form.

Directing his droids, Hux runs the easiest checks first. Height. Weight. Blood tests. The midichlorian count is off the charts. He taps into the visual feed and stops breathing for a moment.

“He’s almost beautiful,” General Pryde had said in another age. Hux stares now and tries to take his fill from looking alone.

From looking at Kylo Ren, unscarred, clad in a raggedy black sweater, exquisitely beautiful and breathing once more. Hux had never known all of him. It occurs to him that he never could have, with the Force filtering their every interaction. And Ren had never even known himself; that much was obvious to any onlooker. He had never had the chance, not when the voice in his own head was forever muddled by the duplicitous whispers of his midichlorians.

Still Hux does his best to know him now. He calls Ren into a stormtrooper training chamber and runs him through simulations. He drops Ren in front of an illusory, computer-generated Snoke, in a TIE cockpit, on the jagged basalt of Mustafar. With a toy saber– Hux cut its kyber crystal small– Ren cuts down Snoke. He spins his TIE fighter with shameless theatricality. He fights on Mustafar, sure-footed as he dances through the mists, and though he has slowed without the Force to guide him here he still moves through the same patterns. He still throws his full weight into battle.

Hux is still mesmerized.

He expects a trick. Ren always was a live grenade, but now the danger is sharper than ever. Hux expects Ren to explode at any second, to tear apart his shuttle and demand Hux’s coordinates. He expects the Force to inflict a bloody revenge by Ren’s hand. He expects Ren to transform at any instant and morph into a superweapon in his own right. 

Ren’s behavior does feel slightly odd, like a picture hung a few degrees askew, yet there’s no note of danger. He is unprecedentedly light, quick to smile, quick to mock the enemies Hux generates around him.

Hux watches.

The test results pile up, convincing Hux that the Force has fulfilled its end of the bargain. While it may be a new set of molecules making up the body, the soul is the same. The Force has returned Ben Solo to the land of the living, intact and sounder of mind than Hux had ever expected, and he is satisfied.

(Hux is unsatisfied– gasping, gaping, electric with want.)

At Hux’s command, a droid on the other ship offers a drink, along with a record of all the drink’s known effects. Ben Solo shoots the cup a skeptical look. Then he shrugs his shoulders and throws back the drink with one gulp.

Hux watches as Ben Solo burns up all his midichlorians.

Fist clenched, pressed hard to his own mouth, Hux wonders if this is the Force’s revenge: to let him see all of Ben Solo and love him, the moment before he gives him up.

Hux does give him up. He lets him go. Grants him a new Upsilon shuttle. Asks him to select a destination, so Hux can consult his maps and plot out a safe route back to his home galaxy.

He chokes up all on his own, when he hears Ben’s choice.

.

On his Destroyer, Hux waits.

A door slides open. He opens his eyes and glances over his shoulder.

“I’ll have moved this ship,” he murmurs, “before you make it back. If you’re here on a recon mission, you’ll bring only outdated information.”

Stepping forth to stand a few feet away, close but out of arm’s reach, Ben Solo frowns. “You’re expecting the Force to retaliate.”

He nods. “I expect you to choke me any second now. This time it might even be a fair fight.”

“The Force–” a shadow passes over his face– “gives you its grudging admiration. It intends to keep its end of the bargain, if you keep yours.”

“It trusts me to stop shooting holes in it?”

They snort in unison.

“You thought you were irrelevant. That the Force knew nothing about you.”

“‘Irrelevant’ was hyperbole,” Hux admits. “I assumed my importance was commensurate with the average rock’s.”

Ben Solo grins. His smile– quick and free and utterly unlike Kylo Ren– strikes Hux like an earthquake.

“Close,” he admits. “But it did make one prediction where you’re concerned.”

“Oh?”

“It noticed you were, uh, focused,” he deadpans. “You got Hosnia. You’ve given up on the empire for the moment, and... you got me.”

“So it thinks I’ll be content.”

Hux nearly scoffs at the thought that he could ever be content, that he can ever become more than an infantile wanting thing.

Then he steals another glance at Ben Solo.

“Honestly, Hux,” he says, “I thought _you’d_ be reconditioning me this time.”

“It’s lost its charm,” Hux quips back.

He chuckles. “So what happens now?”

“It’s entirely your choice. The Force has agreed to arrange your happy ending. Verification will be a logistical nightmare, I’ll want you out here every few years for evaluation, but...that galaxy is yours.”

“Even without my midichlorians?”

“I assume the lack of magic will inconvenience you.”

“But the lack of mind control might make up for it.”

“Precisely. The Force will have to settle for controlling the world _around_ you.”

Ben Solo pushes a hand through those unruly black curls and scowls in a moderately Ren-like fashion.

“You’ll have Rey’s undying devotion,” Hux offers.

“I don’t want it.”

Hux stares for a moment and then huffs in frustration.

“I don’t! She shouldn’t be magically forced into love.”

“Then what _do_ you want?” Hux demands.

“My mind’s so much quieter now,” he says by way of answer. “I can finally hear myself think.”

Silence.

Then Ben Solo saunters forward to join him by the window. He stops just behind Hux, wraps his arms around him and tucks his chin in the hollow of Hux’s shoulder. His hands land on Hux’s arms, fingers calloused and _real._

“If you can make more of this anti-midichlorian stuff,” he remarks, breath warm against Hux's ear, “we could become rebels and free the galaxy.”

“Rebels?” Hux squawks. “You’ve lost your mind, Solo.”

“Did you just call me _Solo?”_

“Would you prefer ‘Ren’?”

“‘Ben’ is fine!”

“Ben, then. I just got out of a galactic war, I’m not running back into one.”

Ben laughs and gives another infuriating shrug, limbs draped warm around Hux, their fingers entwining. “We’ll work back up to it.”

Hux glances out the window. In the distance he can spot their old galaxy, reduced to a mere handful of odd-looking constellations.

“So you’ll stay?” he murmurs, daring to lean back into Ben’s embrace.

“With you, yeah.”

Outside lies a new galaxy of silver stars, waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> The title quotes ["No Time to Die"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB_S2qFh5lU) by Billie Eilish.
> 
> This fic has a [miniature moodboard](https://chekovs-turbolaser.tumblr.com/post/190988744904/aggressive-negotiations-the-blood-you-bleed-is) on tumblr.


End file.
